We’ve had some chat recently about supporting coding newbies and how to organize it, mostly in the Filtering By Volume thread. Some interest was shown. To take the ‘off topic’ load from that volume thread, I decided to start this topic.

What it is for:

a platform for peer-to-peer discussion for all coding newbies relating their struggle and their success in learning MQ4

a platform to ask questions to experienced coders as informal tutors

an invitation to all experienced coders around to support our coding newbies as everybody’s schedule allows

an invitation to all MQL coding newbies around who are really willing to go for it and invest the efforts required

a source for useful links to free material around the topic learning to code MQ4

What it is NOT for:

MQ5 related stuff – that would clutter the topic, making it more difficult for newbies to follow

a debugging platform for 5000 lines of code EAs that underperform (there’s other forums inside penguins’ to provide for that!)

a platform to yell ‘HELP!!! Could you please code for me???’

a platform to post copyrighted content

simplex’ personal classroom for his tutorials (simply because I don’t have them and my current schedule does not allow to create them)

Now let me repost some useful links I posted elsewhere, just to provide a start:

broketrader’s FF thread Learn New MQL Coding: extremely useful when trying to follow the path of Object Oriented Programming (OOP). This is the future of MQL, and it’s not specifically a source for newbies, but will provide valuable additional information. Sergey’s material is definitely the first one to work through for newbies.

If anybody has good links to free content supporting the goal of this topic, please share. I’ll be happy to add them to this top post.

What I would request from you as a topic participant:

Introduce yourself: please start by posting a few lines about your personal experience and skills relating to coding (not only MQL) and mathematics – no matter what level. This is just to get a clearer picture and try to answer in an understandable manner. And maybe add a line or so about your personal goals as an MQL coder.

Please understand this mostly as a peer to peer oriented topic. ‘Students’ are kindly requested to organize themselves, discuss their stuff and support each other.

You are the driving forces here. I won’t provide a schedule, and no exams.

Be prepared that your path to success can be exhausting to follow and that it can take a while to reach the first peak to rest and admire the view.

Thread rules (this list may be extended over time):

absolutely no .ex4 posting in this thread: this is for learning, and for this purpose black boxes are mostly useless. .mq4 and .mqh only, please!

My recommendation: start working through Sergey’s material, start at the beginning, not skipping content or examples. Dive into it! Show up here in class with your personal successes (important!) and with problems when they are consistently inhibiting your proceedings.

I really mean ‘consistently’ – learning to code is to a greater extent a question of endurance: your own endurance, not your tutor’s. So from time to time you might be chewing on a certain problem for hours or days – without any visible success (I’m facing such situations regularly). That’s simple coding business, and you got to learn to deal with it.

When you’re reading Sergey’s material, you might get ideas of variations of his code. Go for it, try to follow your ideas – you can only learn by doing so! And if it doesn’t work, show your project to your fellow students, describe your idea in detail (important!). Often, by describing your ideas in detail, you’ll understand for yourself why it did not work out so far. Share your code that works and that does not work. You might inspire others to help you and themselves.

If some code you’re setting up doesn’t work after a couple of minutes, and you immediately raise your hand for help, you won’t really learn.

I’m really curious where this little experiment will lead us.

And please remember: I can try to explain something to you, but I can’t understand it for you.

Maybe I will start the ball rolling, I have some experience if C++ in high school, but as years went by my job does not need that kind of skill, thus never practise it till fx trading require me to seriously look into programming again.

I am a ex4 users most of the time as mq4 coding need time to digest on the head-body-tail structure coding. Every coders have their own way of writing, so it will be quite tough to understand too.

So my suggestion is that if you really want to learn as a basic coder for a start, you will need to have a preferred trading system in your mind before starting to code something.

For example, I would like to have a system that allow me to input a buy/sell trade when ema100 cross upward/downward ema200 in TF 1H. And release the trade when vice versa condition appear. Within this system, we would have initial conditon, executional body, and ending strategy to form a structure.

The above was how it will be taught in my hugh school, just for sharing purpose. My maths is not that great but still manageable.

I am now crunching on Sergey’s stuff, seems alot to learn buy i think it worth it. As a father of 3 kids, I really need to plan my time well for self learning

Bartleby re video quality, he did replace one of the videos on youtube due to sound quality, I have the paid online course and the quality of the videos is first class, clear and easy to understand, hope that helps.

I would like to share a youtube playlist of jimdandys older mql videos.

I just watched the first one of those videos. For me, it didn’t really provide particularly ‘new’ information , but overall looks good (leaving audio quality aside).

So maybe those videos could provide a nice additional source and an alternative to our daily soap opera on TV, right? When learning, it’s useful to trigger several ‘input channels’ for the lessons to sink in. Sergey’s course requires classical studying by reading, while that youtube playlist will trigger your visual sense and sense of hearing at the same time. So even if a considerable amount of information is presented redundantly, this is useful when learning.

But most important: you will learn to code by practicing! You won’t learn to hit a basket with a basketball by watching Dirk Nowitzki on video, ok?

I have no idea about the quality of the rest of those videos, though. Feel free to share your experience!

s.

A good trader is a realist who wants to grab a chunk from the body of a trend, leaving top- and bottom-fishing to people on an ego trip. (Dr. Alexander Elder)

Subscribe. Thanks @simplex for your good heart and willing to help others …
I learn MQL4 from “Expert Advisor Programming” book, by Andrew R. Young, but can not find the link online of it (pdf) …
May we all can make progress in programming, and get green pips together at the end, all the penguins …
Thanks for link @simplex and @pipatronic …

I learn MQL4 from “Expert Advisor Programming” book, by Andrew R. Young, but can not find the link online of it (pdf) …

I ask you to provide a link only if the relevant material is posted by a legal source (copyright owner) … no ‘warez’ … see my 1st post here. Don’t want to risk legal issues against @saver0 who’s running this site.

s.

A good trader is a realist who wants to grab a chunk from the body of a trend, leaving top- and bottom-fishing to people on an ego trip. (Dr. Alexander Elder)

I ask you to provide a link only if the relevant material is posted by a legal source (copyright owner) … no ‘warez’ … see my 1st post here. Don’t want to risk legal issues against @saver0 who’s running this site. s.

right now i´m at “Program Execution” the first part with an example. Up to now it was a little bit like going to a drawing class..getting lessons about different brushes and pencils , but never got a pencil in my hand.

For someone already experienced in coding in other languages i guess it´s totally fine. If you start with a blank mind..it´s not so easy getting into it..

I hope from now on it will get better with examples. I like a practical approach when learning.

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is a reality." (John Lennon)

The first one will provide basic coding skills and shows a lot of examples in C, Java, and Python. So no MQL, but especially the C examples are very closely related. Could be useful to read alongside with Sergey’s lessons to get a better understanding of basic coding concepts in general.

The second one focuses on ‘Best Practices’, title says it all. This is not programming language specific. Very useful, not only for newbies! Read this, and you will be reminded of most of your ‘coding sins’ .

s.

A good trader is a realist who wants to grab a chunk from the body of a trend, leaving top- and bottom-fishing to people on an ego trip. (Dr. Alexander Elder)

I found an additional resource this morning which appears to be very easy to read and understand: Computer Programming TutorialDevelopers Best Practices Tutorial The first one will provide basic coding skills and shows a lot of examples in C, Java, and Python. So no MQL, but especially the C examples are very closely related. Could be useful to read alongside with Sergey’s lessons to get a better understanding of basic coding concepts in general. The second one focuses on ‘Best Practices’, title says it all. This is not programming language specific. Very useful, not only for newbies! Read this, and you will be reminded of most of your ‘coding sins’ . s.

Thanks for the new link bro … currently i am trying to learn the OOP from the link @FF , really great content …

Manage to find this book in my local library, and I must say I am hooked on this book right from the introduction page! Thanks for the recommendation. Also if any traders have good books to introduce to me, please feel free to post and share the titles here, thanks all for the recommendation :)

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